American History and the History Major

For college-level history, in the schools and on campuses, these are the best of times and the worst of times. I shall develop this theme first by reviewing Advanced Placement in the schools, then by turning to the colleges. I shall both reminisce and quote statistics to make my point, which is, of course, in the spirit of the new social history.

In 1971 I completed my five-year term as chief reader of American His­tory AP. This was the time of Vietnam, campus protests, urban riots, and de­mands for changes in national and so­cial priorities. The AP Program felt these and other pressures. Educational radicals called for the “deschooling of America,” decried elitism as in the AP Program, sneered at the pursuit of ex­cellence, and denounced standardized testing. The evangels of egalitarianism had their counterparts on  campus and in the schools. Distribution require­ments disappeared and grade inflation triumphed. Education itself sometimes disappeared, too, which was a cause for rejoicing in certain quarters; in the eu­phoria of the moment, activists gave little note to the decline of public sup­port and the shrinking of educational budgets. Even moderate educational re­formers insisted that courses be made more relevant and that American his­tory in particular recognize social groups that allegedly had hitherto been neglected.

The College Board did not waver in its support of the AP Program despite the skepticism in some quarters and the fact that the program invariably ran a deficit. Faith that this was a good pro­gram was used to balance the accounts. Meanwhile, the College Board’s Com­mittee of Examiners (as we were then called), aided by ETS staffers, did what we could to make the tests relevant, and the Board and ETS arranged for special reporting of the protest papers that some students substituted for essays on the examination. We did our test constructing almost too well, for we began to receive complaints from teachers and students that the examinations were weighted too heavily toward minority, social, and cultural history. Still, I re­member with some satisfaction a ques­tion that we devised on urban history, which permitted students to write an essay on any one of a number of speci­fied American cities at selected times. The question was difficult to draft, and establishment of standards for uniform grading even more difficult; but readers were impressed by the knowledge of some students about  the  histories  of such places as Los Angeles and  Salt Lake City.

As for the protest papers, one of my tasks was to read them all. Even in the worst year, 1970, the number was small­er than we had anticipated, partly be­cause the nature of the test eliminated the grounds for complaint. I still re­member one paper written by a student who had obviously come prepared to protest; he was honest enough to write that the test gave him nothing to object to, but he stated that he intended to protest anyway.

By 1971 the political atmosphere be­gan to lighten. It appeared that educa­tion in the United States might survive after all, and the College Board’s Com­mittee of Examiners worked hard to develop new kinds of questions. We attempted to write linked multiple­ choice questions; the idea was that such questions, if developed carefully, might replicate some features of an essay ex­amination. I still think that this can be done, but the effort died before comple­tion. The main reason was that the committee turned in a different direc­tion and chose to develop a  question that would demonstrate whether AP students had learned to analyze documents and write research papers. Many persons contributed to the development of what became known as the DBQ, or document-based question, but several should be singled out for their efforts: William Hochman of Colorado College, Father Giles Hayes of the Delbarton School, Steve Klein of ETS, and, later, Harry Scheiber of the University of Cal­ifornia and Robert Bannister of Swarthmore College.

I left the committee during the early stages of creating the DBQ,  relieved that I had fulfilled my major responsi­bility (i.e., managing the examination reading) without any serious  glitches and without any lost papers. The seven­ty-five college and secondary school teachers who worked with me in 1971 had actually read 12,695 sets of exami­nations, each of which included three essays. It was a herculean task—proba­bly the limit of what could be done, I thought. In any event, American history AP seemed to have reached a plateau in size after rapid growth in the mid- and late-1960s.

During the next few years, I was busy with budgetary crises as Dean of Liberal Arts at Oregon, but I continued to per­form some missionary work on occasion for a program I greatly admired, I watched the development of the DBQ with particular interest. I was, for in­stance, impressed by the imaginative and challenging DBQ of 1976, which asked whether American society was becoming more democratic from the 1750s to the 1780s as evidenced by life in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The se­lected documents included visual mate­rials and legal, property, and voting records. Thus AP students had to use the same kinds of materials that leading historians were utilizing. Few college freshmen or even upper-division stu­dents have faced so demanding and sophisticated a test.

I also began to notice, however, how long and arduous the DBQs were be­ coming. Students no longer had to read, reflect upon, and, within forty minutes, write an essay analyzing a mere fifteen or so documents; they had to deal with twenty and even more documents. I heard repeated complaints from AP teachers and students that the question was becoming an ordeal. And when I discovered that some AP teachers were shrewdly instructing their students in methods of quick appraisal and skillful annotation, I wondered how AP readers could evaluate such papers. The chief readers during the 1970s and early 1980s—Robert    Bannister, John Niven of the Claremont Graduate School, and Alden Vaughan of Columbia University—and their assembled colleague somehow managed to  cope with the mass of documents and the students’ use or misuse of them. I admired their skill in evaluating the examination pa­pers all the more as I learned that the number of papers was rising rapidly.

The first jump came in 1974, with a one-year surge of about 12 percent to 14,331. Each year thereafter was much the same: 12 percent growth in 1975, 16 percent in 1976, 14 precent in 1977, 15 percent in 1978, 15 percent in 1979, 14 percent in 1980, 12 percent in 1981. These increases were truly astounding given the fact that the base figures were getting so large. By 1981, the number of examinations in American history had reached 35,999.

Soon after the AP reading in the summer of 1981, I agreed to the request of the College Board that I return to the Committee of Examiners, renamed the Test Development Committee, and serve as its chair. The occasion was not so much a feeling of nostalgia on the Board’s part, I think, as it was a notion that I was so experienced in dealing with budgetary crises that I might ap­preciate the budgetary problems that the program faced at the moment.

The major strategy that we on the Test Development Committee em­ployed was to change the format of the examination; this involved setting the number of multiple-choice questions at 100, reducing the number of essay ques­tions from three to two, lengthening one essay to fifty minutes, retaining the DBQ at forty minutes, and providing a fifteen-minute required period for stu­dents to study the documents and plan their essays. Although the full exam remained at three hours, this arrange­ment made possible important econom­ics in time and money, at the reading, increased the statistical validity of the total test, and improved the quality of the essays. Readers have uniformly pro­claimed the compulsory fifteen-minute study time a marked improvement in the test.

But the changes also addressed aca­demic problems. Teachers, students, and readers alike complained that the DBQ had gotten out of control. A care­ful analysis by the test development staff at ETS, led by Steve Klein, provided evidence that the DBQ was not doing what had originally been desired. (See Mr. Klein’s article in the AP column, Perspectives, May 1983.) The result was a marked change in the nature of that examination. As Klein explained, as ear­ly as 1975 the examiners had abandoned the DBQ’s original requirement that students assess the relevance and reliability of evidence in the documents and settled for analysis of the documents and synthesis in the essays. Many, if by no means all, teachers and readers were skeptical about whether the DBQ was testing historical knowledge and concluded that it had become a sophisti­cated new aptitude test. In addition, the Test Development Committee had found the preparation of the lengthy DBQ to be an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming task.

After several years of discussion, the debate over the DBQ came to a head in committee meetings during the autumn of 1981. The unanimous conclusion was that the number of documents must be reduced to around seven or eight, and that students must display more outside historical knowledge—that is, informa­tion that could not be derived from the documents. Drafting the new test proved to be difficult; there was no backlog of alternative questions, and the committee operated under severe time constraints in selecting documents, checking them, and preparing and edit­ing the question. The fact that the entire format of the 1982 examination was to be altered, further complicated our chore. But after the most arduous committee sessions I have ever participated in, we sent the examination to press in time for distribution at the May 1982 exam date.

When working on questions, the Committee must take great care to in­sure fairness of choice, some semblance of breadth, coverage in subject matter and chronology, and as much precision in language as possible. Students of the teacher or professor who writes lazy or obscure questions directing them to “de­scribe” or “discuss” something, might learn during the year how to read be­tween the lines, or may even ask the teacher or professor during the test what the question means. That is not possible on a nationally administered test. The slightest error in language can have catastrophic consequences and lead to angry recriminations by victim­ized students and teachers. (For addi­tional information on this subject see Robert Blackey’s articles “A Guide to the Skill of Essay Construction in His­tory,” Social Education, March 1981, and “How Advanced Placement History Es­say Questions Are Prepared—And How Yours Can Be Too,” Perspectives, No­vember 1982.)

I was anxious about the 1982 ques­tion. The sophisticated theme involving John Brown and sectional strife that was originally devised had lost something when the number of documents that could be employed was cut back drasti­cally. We also worried that AP students, who had been trained by teachers to annotate many documents, would not bring in the outside historical informa­tion we demanded. ETS sent out two mailings to all schools involved; but mail often stops at the principal’s or counsel­lor’s desk, and we feared that some teachers and students would not get the message that the DBQ and the general format had changed.  I worried, too, that students would find answering 100 hard multiple-choice questions exhaust­ing, as I myself did when I took the test.

So it was with considerable trepida­tion that I went to nearby South Eugene High School on the day of the examina­tion. South has had AP courses for years, and many of the students there are very bright; nevertheless, I wanted to see how they did and talk with them after the exam. I was relieved to observe that, with a few exceptions, they did not appear rushed to finish the multiple­ choice portion. And afterwards, a num­ber of them told me that they liked the new format. They recognized the DBQ for what it really had become, a fairly standard subject matter question.

As it turned out, my sample of stu­dents was misleading. Readers at Princeton were disappointed by the per­formance nationally, for many students drilled in answering the old, lengthy DBQs, insisted on writing quick sum­maries of the documents and did not include nearly the amount of outside historical information we wanted. One could not blame them for being so cau­tious; after all, an entire school year’s credit depended on their performance.

We were not happy with what we found. Still, almost all readers approved the change in format, applauded the fifteen-minute reading and preparation period as an improvement, and agreed that we must try the shorter DBQ again.

We did try again. We had no alterna­tive other than to abandon the DBQ altogether, which we had actually con­sidered, and we had gotten a start on what became the 1983 Populism DBQ. Happily, I can report that the students’ performance in 1983 improved. On the DBQ essays there was less summarizing of documents and somewhat more out­side historical information. Part of the remaining problem was our own fault. Even though there were only eight doc­uments, readers told us that we had selected them so skillfully that it was difficult for students to know something that was not treated in the documents. Yet, almost all readers said the Test Development Committee at last was on the right course with the DBQ.

The growth of the American History AP, from 38,286 test takers in 1982 to a phenomenal 43,844 in 1983, was fur­ther reason for self-congratulations, al­though AP had not taken over Ameri­can education. There are, after all, 22,000 schools in the United States with well over a million college-bound graduates yearly. But the problem clearly was well established and making its mark. At the University of Michigan, for instance, 1,703 freshmen entered in the fall of 1983 with AP credit in one or another subject; the figure at Stanford was 1,651.

I have been asked whether, with this growth, the AP program has maintained the quality it had twelve years ago, when fewer than a third as many students took the American history test. Similar doubts surfaced from the very beginning of AP. Originally some per­sons questioned whether sixteen-, sev­enteen-, and eighteen-year-olds could handle college-level material; the fact that the first AP candidates came from a handful of elite New England and Middle Atlantic prep schools somewhat al­layed complaints. The same refrain was heard when the program spread from Andover, Exeter, Kent, and Lawrence­ville to Woodberry Forest and the New­man School, and to leading public schools such as Shaker Heights, New Trier, Beverly Hills, Lowell, and South Eugene; but again it helped that every­one knew that these schools had out­standing teachers and very bright stu­dents.

By the mid-1960s it was clear that students from many other schools were doing equally well on the test. For a time in the late 1960s, I thought that growing participation by large urban high schools and parochial schools had in­creased the number of poor papers; whatever reality there was to my impres­sionistic assumption soon disappeared, as the newly participating schools adjusted to AP’s standards. My distinct feeling after reading papers during the last two years is that the quality of student essays is as high with 43,000 partic­ipants as it was when there were only 12,000.

I suspect that outstanding individual papers are as likely to come from Boun­tiful, Utah, as they are from the Bronx High School of Science or Groton School. Some schools obviously have more bright students and skilled teach­ers. But there is a great deal of talent across the country. I continue also to be impressed with the quality of AP teach­ers I meet at the reading and at confer­ences. They are highly motivated about their students and deeply involved in teaching.

Much of what I have written would, I think, be supported by the college pro­fessors who take part in the reading. Each is asked his or her impression of the students’ performance at the end of the reading. Moreover, there are equa­tor questions in the multiple-choice ex­amination that allows ETS statisticians to judge the ability of each year’s class compared to the previous year. This information is used in cutting the curve (i.e., determining the grades—1 through 5—to be reported).¹ If you look at the final test statistics over the years, you will see occasional shifts in performance levels; but it is clear that the overall quality of AP has been maintained despite the incredible growth in numbers.                         .

So, is all well in the world of AP American History? It is not, for in complacency would lie disaster. There are a number of problems in the American history program. I shall mention just the most serious and then turn briefly to the somewhat different but even more serious problems at the colleges and universities.

The first difficulty is that the AP American history teacher has an almost impossible task in terms of coverage. The best way to discover this is to listen to AP teachers talk to each other. Their initial question will often be. How far are you in your course? They feel that they are in a race to get from the beginnings of American history to 1945 and beyond. College professors simply do not have the same problem because they make up their own tests and can adjust their questions accordingly. AP teachers have to prepare their students for a nationally administered exam covering a full year’s work. So, when they skip a topic or cover something thinly, they are taking a chance.

Many teachers, alas, skim over the colonial period. This became apparent in June 1983 when we read the responses to the question on the Puritans. There were some good essays, but there also were many poor ones—based more often on a reading of Nathaniel Haw­thorne and Arthur Miller in an English class, it would appear, than on anything substantial historically. Many students viewed the Purtians as something akin to early American Nazis.

There is a problem at the other chro­nological end, too, since the exam is given around the eighteenth or twenti­eth of May, just before some schools conclude their year, while others go on for several weeks or even a month after the test. How do those teachers reach the postwar period by exam time?

In terms of substantive content, stu­dents’ performances continue to be weak in economic history—though this was not true in 1983 in a question about the 1920s and 1930s—and in anything but fairly simple social history, except perhaps for recent black history. On the positive side, in 1983 students’ perfor­mances were especially good on a ques­tion on early diplomatic history.

Again, college teachers adjust their tests to what they teach. AP teachers enjoy no such luxury. Do AP teachers teach less well? Numerous experiments demonstrate that AP students perform better than college students on the same AP tests.

Now there is increased pressure from some college historians for AP teachers to concentrate more heavily on the new social history. Such advocates should remember how hard the AP teacher’s task already is. The AP test permits considerable flexibility, and teachers can certainly develop thematic courses and exclude certain kinds of topics when they include others. Nevertheless, teachers will feel pressure to provide some breadth in coverage, including po­litical as well as social history, and stu­dents should demand it.

In reference to the college survey course and the history major, both are in great difficulty, even after and per­haps because of a decade of infiltration by the new social history. Evidence of this difficulty can be found in the many articles written in Perspectives. Many remedies have been tried and apparent­ly, few have worked.

Meanwhile, the number of bachelor’s degrees in history has dropped from 45,631 awarded in 1971–72 to only 19,601 in 1980–81. Recall that the num­ber of candidates in AP American his­tory nearly reversed these figures during the same period. So who is in trou­ble? And who should be advising whom about what to include in history courses? Perhaps we should have some conferences or panels during which high school teachers help college history professors deal with their serious prob­lem. If the trend keeps up, the history major may disappear.

I am being intentionally provocative. The problem in college history pro­grams cannot be laid entirely at the door of the new social historians. Some of them undoubtedly teach well and attract students. But some of them, as well as some of their tradition-minded col­leagues, do not concentrate sufficiently on their teaching.

In all fairness, the problem of decline in majors is by no means limited to history degrees but crosses the spectrum of arts and sciences programs. We have all read the anxious paragraphs in A Nation at Risk and similar reports focusing particularly on the deficiencies in the teaching of the sciences, engineer­ing, and computer sciences, and in some studies on shortcomings in foreign lan­guage instruction as well.

The statistics on majors back up these concerns. Mathematics degrees de­clined, in the years 1971–72 to 1980–81, from 23,848 to only 11,078; and modern languages declined from 18,914 to 10,132. The number of En­glish degrees also declined from 56,094 to 26,006. So history is not alone.

I think the reasons for the decline are obvious. We are not emphasizing teaching enough, and we do not work hard enough on our teaching at the college level and in the secondary schools, in­cluding some AP courses. We tend to ride our own hobby horses instead of think­ing about the students’ broad needs.

However, this is only part of the ex­planation and probably the lesser part. In the first place, demography is against us. Many history majors have tradition­ally gone into teaching, but now and for some time to come, jobs in the second­ary schools in the social sciences will be hard to come by. The prestige of the teaching profession has declined, and there is little talk of doing anything about the situation in the social sciences. So students—especially bright stu­dents—look elsewhere. This situation will not change until the 1990s at the earliest.

Since the 1970s, college students have been turning away from liberal arts to professional programs. Thomas J. Moore’s article in the Washington Post (October 23, 1983), “Tinker, Tai­lor, Waitress, Clerk: Is It Worthwhile to Go to College?” provides a succinct if somewhat popularized analysis of the situation. (A more detailed, six-part ver­sion appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.) Among Moore’s conclusions are the fol­lowing:

“One of the most disturbing aspects of the current situation is its impact on liberal education. Traditionally, a liberal arts curriculum enabled a student to have it both ways. The student could pursue knowledge for its own sake and still usually end up with a professional, white collar job. But that is no longer the case, according to my analysis of the job status of the high school class of ’72. [Moore did a com­puter analysis of a sample of 20,000 graduates of the high school class of 1972.]

“Less than half of those majoring in such fields as psychology, economics, history, English, art and music were in college-level jobs three years after they left college.

“Not surprisingly, given that re­cord, the number of liberal arts de­grees has been declining rapidly. From 1975 to 1981, for example, the number of graduates with history de­grees fell 43 percent. Sociology de­grees fell 45 percent and English de­grees declined 36 percent.

“The choice of a college major, I found, was the single largest determi­nant of a college graduate’s subse­quent success, or lack of it, in entering a college-level career.”

I must add that Moore does not con­sider college a waste of time or money, and he believes there are good noneco­nomic arguments to be made for college education. He is simply warning us of some dramatic trends.

What to do? Recognize reality. Con­cede that history students and other liberal arts majors will be turning else­ where. Encourage them to do so. Tell them to study what the market wants and needs. But also advise them to study subjects such as history. Urge them to become double majors, or to take a major in a professional program and a minor in history, or, better yet, a major in history and a minor in the other program. In sum, urge them to become educated persons for their own satisfac­tion and their own good.

Patricia Lund Casserly, who has for more than a decade done extensive studies of AP students for ETS and the College Board, currently is engaged in another follow-up study of these stu­dents. Recently, during a visit to Eu­gene, where she was studying the subse­quent development of AP students on our campus, she told me how impressed she was with these students, many of whom are in our Honors College or otherwise doing well. She also has been noticing, in Oregon and elsewhere, that AP students are using their AP credits to pursue more efficiently double ma­jors and minors. As usual AP is a trend­setter. Colleges need to recognize what is going on. Pat said she told one of our students who wanted to study literature, but whose parents insisted that she study computer science, “Take comput­er science but also take some lit courses, for your soul.” Pat reported that the young lady thanked her for saying that.

I would of course add, “and study history.” Advise your students to pursue their career goals and enroll in history courses for the sake of body and soul. It is in their interest and ours as well.

 

Note

1. The entire 1984 American history examination will be made public; this includes the multiple­ choice questions. This is the first time in years that the full test is to be disclosed. The equator questions on this test, of course, cannot be used again. [↩]